Employees can be trained either to acquire more skills OR for developing their competencies. These are not the same thing and their value is not equal in the workplace. Skills are very specific activities, some more complex than others. Competencies are the capability of employees to apply a set of related knowledge, skills, and abilities required to successfully perform critical work functions.

Building a learning culture is the best way to ensure your company will navigate successfully through the ever-changing business environment of today and of the future. The first step is focusing on the people. They are an organization’s best assets and as such they should be provided with diverse and flexible opportunities to learn. Once this is achieved, all employees are given the opportunity to excel at what they do.

By using e-learning in business training you can reach everybody in the company and if your courses are designed right, there is no challenge in getting them to stick with you. A great content design is critical for learner engagement, so you need to consider at least micro-learning, scenarios, gamification and responsive design.

Blended learning is such an efficient and easy solution for professional development that it is bound to become the norm for corporate training. It’s a wonderfully balanced combination that also lowers training costs and improves information retention. It’s just bound to become the special on the corporate training menu.

It may seem that digital natives do everything differently than the previous generations of employees but give them the time, the choice and the right technology and they will prove that different is in this case better. In order to design programs that will be both friendly and effective for them there are a few things to be taken into account. Check them out!

Employees tend to perform better when they feel empowered, have a say in their work and understand the added value of the tasks they are asked to perform. That’s why organizations everywhere should encourage and foster self-directed learning (SDL) and give employees more control over their professional learning process.

Immersive technologies are perfect for training people who perform risky jobs because it can simulate dangerous or risky situations within a safe, controlled environment. These can also be used for recruitment, on-boarding new employees, or helping team members develop interpersonal skills at work. 360° photos, 360° videos, 3D simulations, VR and MR are just 5 examples of immersive technology for training.

These days there is a subscription for anything, from daily pics of cute cats to new o scientific breakthroughs and every sale both online and offline. So it only makes sense to use enrollment as a learning tool. Subscription learning can be an effective way for companies to make use of the modern appetite of people for internet and repeatability.

Whenever putting out a hiring ad, companies ask for innovative people who can think outside of the box. Creativity seems to have become the number one prerequisite for pretty much everything. The ‘box’, with its implication of rigidity and squareness, symbolizes constrained and unimaginative thinking. So how exactly can one think outside the box? And what can instructional designers do support this kind of thinking?

When it comes to creating training courses most clients tend to believe it is either one or the other, and if they do choose both they assume two independent development streams and budgets. But if we consider the amount of cost and effort to create both instructor-led courses and e-learning ones, the best option for maximizing the training budget is to go for both these possibilities.